The ‘UEC-01’ and ‘UEC-02’ are two custom ICs you can find on most Seibu/TAD Corporation PCBs also marked as ‘HB-1’ and ‘HB-2’.They are ceramic modules in SIL/SIP package.Here’s how they looks like:

The first handles I/O, the latter drives coin counters/lockouts.Reproducing them was straightforward given the simplicity of their internal circuit so for sake of completeness I took into account also the ‘UEC-02’ although nowadays few people use coin counters:

Testing on a Blood Bros PCB :

The ‘JK-03’ can be found, instead, on Jaleco MegaSystem1 hardware, it accomplishes the same function of the ‘UEC-01/HB-1’ handling the inputs.It comes in form of a SIL/SIP ceramic module as well (with different pin counting and pitch though)

Having no part to analyze I used some available schematics in order to reproduce it:

Due to the lack of a working PCB I could not test it hence volunteers are welcome!

I have two Toki pcbs in storage, both with sprite errors. I saw a video from lukemorse1 (who actually inspired me to start repairing arcade pcbs) on youtube where he worked on a Toki pcb, also with sprite errors.

Here’s how the error on board #1 looked like:

So there are blocks surrounding the sprites.

From Luke’s video (https://youtu.be/Czdt_yTNRTs) I identified the area responsible for sprite handling and I quickly found a 74LS273 with a stuck output at pin 19:

Checking with the multimeter, I found that this pin was almost shorted to ground:

I quickly desoldered the IC and tested it with my VP-398

Replacing it with a working 74LS273 made the sprites appear as they should:

So a big thanks to lukemorse1 and also as always to caius for always helping out 🙂

While searching through some documents from Data I/O I came across a bunch of logic diagrams for various PLD’s. One of them was for the CK2605.
As I’ve not seen this in the wild before I thought I’d upload it.

Board booted into game but sound was missing and some objects glitched :

I decided to troubleshoot for first the lack of sound.The amplifier was previously replaced as well as some electrolytic capacitors:

Using my audio probe I could figure out that the lack of sound was not caused by a fault in the analog circuit but it had a digital nature so I went to check the relevant circuit made of a Z80B CPU, a 6264 SRAM, a ROM and a YM2151 (plus a UPD7759 for speech samples) and I found that pin 13 (data line D5) of the RAM was silent as well as on the respective data bit of the Z80 and the YM2151 :

But it was toggling on the ROM (a 27C512 EPROM) which lies on ROM board :

There was clearly a broken trace somewhere so I run a jumper wire from the RAM to the ROM:

This restored the sound.

Now the sprites issue.Relevant data are stored in eight 27C512 on ROM board :

I dumped the devices and my programmer complained about a bad contact on pin 9 of the EPROM @B2 and pin 16 of the one @B7:

At a closer inspection it turned out the pins were cut so they didn’t make a good contact into sockets:

Received from USA this mint Contra PCB (by Konami), actually with japanese stickers and ROM set :

The board kept resetting in an endless loop sign that CPU was executing no valid code hence the watchdog circuit was triggered:

The two program ROMs were dumped as good so problem was elsewhere.Board was almost fully populated with Fuitsu TTLs which are well known to be prone to failure.When probing them with a logic probe I found a floating output (pin 11) of a 74LS08 @17D:

This was confirmed also by logic analyzing and scope:

As schematics shows, the missing signal from pin 11 is called VRC and it should be a control line routed to the custom ‘007452’ :

I removed the TLL and tested it out-of-circuit where it failed miserably :